Voter integrity advocates worry that Colorado is poised to be at the forefront of a 2000 Bush/Gore Florida disaster if our elections process isn’t cleared up.
The issue is that the Colorado Constitution requires that the person casting a ballot cannot be identified by marks on the ballot, but a group that filed an open records request for scanned ballots in a Boulder election received images that had been redacted, with the explanation that without the redactions, the ballots could have been used, in conjunction with other public records, to identify who cast them. The ballots, in other words can be traced.
Traceable ballots could mean an invalid election. Bad ju-ju.
“At what point does the reduction of individual rights in our country change how we define ourselves?”, Jonathan Turley asks in a Washington Post Op-Ed, “10 reasons the U.S. is no longer the land of the free.” [Let's agree to fogive the hyperbole in the title, assume Turley didn't write it, and acknowledge that there never was a golden age of perfect freedom in the U.S., not even for wealthy, white, male landowners.]
Turley lists 10 recent encroachments on civil rights by the assumption of new powers over citizens, starting with the right to assassinate any U.S. citizen considered allied with terrorists and ending with “extraordinary renditions”, the right to send anybody, anywhere for any reason, usually understood as the right to transfer people outside our borders for torture.
Using the fictional residents of the upscale Belmont and the grubbier Fishtown, Charles Murray, co-author of The Bell Curve and currently of the American Enterprise Institute, assembles statistics to demonstrate and then explicate the emergence of two distinct classes in the United States, classes which, for the first time, diverge from “the founding virtues” of the nation and so begin to redefine “the American Way of Life”. And it’s not an improvment, at least not for most of us.
President Obama will ask Congress today for the authority to consolidate government agencies with redundant and overlapping responsibilities, in an effort to shrink the size of government, increase effeciency, and win the 2012 election. Obama proposed something along these lines in last year’s State of the Union speech and has to make another pretty soon, so the timing is good. It wouldn’t hurt his re-election chances to steal this issue from the Republicans, but to pull it off he’ll have to be granted some exceptional power, “held by no president since Ronald Reagan”, according to the L.A. Times.
The question is not how much of an election-year stunt this is — of course it’s an election-year stunt — but whether is it a good idea (I think so, but the devil is always in the details), and whether the Republican House will allow this issue-theft. It’s hard to see, though, how the House would defeat this proposal without damaging their candidate’s presidential chances, but maybe we get to see some hint of whether the Republicans believe in smaller government or the Republican Party.
There’s a brief bit from the L.A. Timer here, a more detailed report from the Washington Post here.